Que Du Luu’s autobiographical youth adult novel Im Jahr des Affen (2016) is about search for identity and being different without feeling different. The 16-year-old main character Mini has Chinese roots, came to Germany as a small child as Vietnamese boat people and describes herself as a banana: yellow on the outside and white on the inside. She lives with her father in a shabby high-rise building in Herford where the father runs a Chinese restaurant and spends most of his time. The employees in the restaurant are also closely linked to the history of the Vietnamese boat people and the restaurant by this means reflect experiences of flight, foreignness, and homelessness. The visit of a Chinese uncle, who lives in Australia, strengthens the Chinese identity of the father and the expectations on Mini to preserve her Chinese identity and language are further reinforced.
This paper explores the fact that not only people but also ideas, memories, and images of identity cross borders and are established beyond the border lines (Nyman & Schimanski 2021). Narratives thus remain in the minds of the refugees and once they have arrived, they construct new configurations of belonging and becoming (Brambilla 2015). This affects the next generation as the refugees might have certain expectations of their children to preserve their original identity, language and belonging, regardless of whether the children have ever been in the home country or not. The next generation of the refugees may find themselves in a third space, caught between the “old” and “new” world. At the same time, they are expected to preserve their first language and cultural traditions and pass them on to future generations. Mini does not remember being in a refugee camp and the escape over the sea, even though these circumstances affect her entire life and shape her identity through transgenerational memories (Assmann 2006). In the eyes of other Chinese people, she cannot be anything else than Chinese and she must deal with a – to her - constructed image and narrative of Germanness and Chineseness/otherness and the dichotomic order that confines migrants to certain (constructed) social environments. In other words, this article highlights the voice of the next generation in migrant literature, and it pays particular attention to hybridity, inter- and transgenerational memories, and the expectations that migrant children live with.